Simplosys Solutions Blog

Selecting your Email Marketing provider is a VERY important decision any website or online business will make. Why? Because once you make your pick, it is VERY difficult to change the provider if you decide to change your mind in the future. I know what you are thinking. You could always export your list to Excel or CSV and import it into another list management product, right? Yes, but there's a catch. Most list management software require your subscribers to opt in again when you import a list. This is to ensure compliance with the Spam act and make sure that all your subcribers have actually expressed interest to be part of your site. Furthermore, it's not just the list. Each product has analytics and tracking info that cannot be transffered from one product to the other easily. In Email marketing, knowing the history of a specific email list is very important in order to be able to segment your list and make a targeted pitch to each segment. So, long story short, once you pick an email marketing solution, you are more or less married to it for life. I know that sounds scary, but it's true.

First off, you need to decide between a Server Software based solution versus Hosted Solution. The difference is that a server-based solution is a software product you buy and install on your server (or even desktop, in the case of certain products). Hosted solutions manage your mailing lists on their servers.

Server Based software:

1. AutoResponse Plus
   
2. Interspire
3. PhpList
4. G-Lock Easy Mail
5. World Merge
6. Major Domo
7. Mail Loop

Hosted Solutions:

1. Aweber
2. GetResponse
3. MailChimp
4. iContact
5. Constant Contact
6. TrafficWave
7. EmailAces
   
8. Profollow

There are several more, but I've listed the top few that get discussed whenever this topic comes up.

The big difference in the two is that in server based solutions, the email goes ot from your server where your Email Management software is hosted versus their server. Email management campaigns often result in several spam complaints. This is not because you are sending out spam. People often subscribe to a list to get something that you are giving away for free. And then, instead of simply unsubscribing from the list, they actually click the "This is spam" button on their email. The more of these that you get, the higher the chances that your ISP's like Hotmail, Yahoo Etc. might blacklist the server that sends out these message. End of story. You then will need to move your list to a new server and play this game again. Not a fun thing to do AT ALL. Hosted solutions maintain a team of professionals that to negotiate and work with ISP's to un-blacklist them. They also have thousands of servers, so that if one range is blacklisted, another, in some other part of the world, will take care of delivering your emails. So, unless your list will always remain relatively small (less than 500 subscribers or so) and your subscribers are ULTRA-faithful to you and you don't see very many spam complaints coming in at all, then my recommendation is to go with a hosted email provider. 

With me so far? Great..

The next decision is what hosted solution provider to go with. As of this writing, Aweber.com is the industry leader (at least as far a buzz is concerned) followed by GetResponse.com. I am really talking about the medium-sized niche here. There are Email marketing solutions out there that charge thousands of dollars a month that only larger corporations can afford, I am not even talking about them here.

Aweber and GetResponse have been there since the late 90's. The longevity of a company is an important consideration here. The longer they've been in business, the more aware they are of ways to work with ISP's to ensure deliverability. The chances that the ISP's have special considerations for these companies is also higher.

iContact was used by Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign.

We've worked with several solutions out there. Mailchimp is good, but we don't like the integration features as much. It's not that straightforward to integrate their forms to the mailing list. Also, segmenting a list, Etc. is not that straightforward either. Their pricing structure is as follows:

That leaves us with Aweber and GetResponse. These are the two most used providers and the most debated ones as well.  Many have compared them in great detail, so I will not bother to do the same here. Look at the following links:

http://johnkhoo.com/aweber-vs-getresponse-which-one-will-you-choose/ 

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/email-marketing-opt-lists/38942-aweber-vs-getresponse-others.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/38603-aweber-alternatives.html#post356583

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/12392-aweber-annoys-me-getresponse-isnt-up-par-options-2.html

1. Aweber has a phenomenal tracking and analytics tool that really helps you identify and sell to your subscriber base much more effectively than getresponse does.  Aweber is also easier to use and has much more features and better integration with wordpress, Joomla, Etc.
2. Cost. Aweber is about 5 times more expensive than getresponse.

The above plans include unlimited mailings to up to 10000 subscribers. For every additional 5000 subscribers, an extra $4.50 per month will be charged, in arrears, after 30 days.

So, considering a 10k mailing list, paid annually, Aweber is $69 per month whereas getresponse will cost $12.15/month. For a 20K list, Aweber will cost $149/month whereas getresponse will cost $21.15 per month.

In short, aweber usually costs up to 5-6 times more than getresponse.

Aweber is better but MUCH more expensive. I wanted to start small with a cheaper solution and move to the better one like Aweber eventually. But that was risky, as explained earlier. However, I realized that there does exist another option - PROFOLLOW.COM.

Profollow.com is a Private Label reseller company of Aweber.com. Basically, they offer the EXACT SAME service as Aweber.com except the Analytics and Tracking features. They offer a much more affordable pricing structure though.
Service Plan                  Price          Savings
Paid Monthly               $19.95        n/a
Paid Quarterly             $53.85       $6.00
Paid Semi-Annually   $101.70    $18.00

The best part is that when you are ready to upgrade to Aweber for all their bells and whistles you can do so easily and your subscriber base will NOT have to opt in a second time. All integration plugins that work with Aweber will work with Profollow.

For most smaller companies, this would perobably make the most sense. There are some more resellers of Aweber as well. I have not compared ProFollow with the others. Something you might want to do yourself.

http://www.profollow.com
http://www.JVListPro.com
http://www.ProSender.com
http://www.turboautoresponders.com
http://www.pro-response.com

Hope this will help you in choosing your email list management provider.
 
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